Berry Inspirational

I know this is from a while back, but this was the first time that I really felt like I could, in fact, one day be a teacher and love it. The summer before last I had the opportunity to lead 120 campers between the ages of 7 and 10 in a one hour nature hike near the summer camp that I grew up going to.  I led two tours a day for five days, so I had twelve children and two cabin leaders for each hike.   I was given a booklet that contained pictures and facts about some of the plants along the trail, some of the history of the land and other random nature facts.  Along our walk, we stopped at certain “artifacts” and talked about them.  I chose a camper to read each page (only about two sentences) and then I added on some extra interesting facts about what we were looking at.  Two of the “artifacts” were types of berries.  When we got to the berries, we talked about how some berries are good to eat and some berries will make you very sick.   Because there were 120 campers and all of their cabin leaders I asked each person to only take one of each berry so that there would be enough for everyone and we could leave some for the wild animals.  We tried thimble berries and huckleberries.  

            Every hike was a success.  More than one hundred of the campers said that they learned something new and most of them had never tried either of the berries before.  I was confident in the information that I was teaching and by the second hike I did not need to look at the little book whatsoever.  Because we were walking while we were learning and the “artifacts” were fairly interesting, even the campers who had struggled with behavior during other aspects of the camp were able to be successful during the hike.   Everyone participated in reading the booklet out loud and no one ran off.  This experience helped me to see that I do have the enthusiasm and the passion to teach children. 

Teaching Standards: K1, C1